NEW ORLEANS — Before Sean Payton took his first head coaching job in New Orleans in 2006, the Saints had a grand total of one playoff victory since their founding in 1967.
The standard will be considerably higher for the next head coach in the Big Easy.
Payton, whose 16-year tenure with the club included its only Super Bowl championship and also a one-season suspension stemming from the NFL’s bounty investigation, is leaving coaching — for now.
Payton informed the team on Tuesday that he is leaving his first and only NFL head coaching job with a 152-89 regular-season record — and nine playoff appearances — in 15 seasons. The 2009 Saints won the NFL title.
“I don’t like the word retirement,” Payton said Tuesday afternoon at an announcement attended by owner Gayle Benson, top management and assistant coaches. “I still have a vision for doing things in football. And I’ll be honest with you, that might be coaching again at some point. I don’t think it’s this year, I think maybe in the future. That’s not where my heart is right now.”
Payton is under contract with the Saints for three more seasons, and if he’s hired by another NFL team before then, his new team would have to provide compensation to New Orleans.
The Saints made the relatively risky decision to hire Payton as a rookie head coach in their first season back in New Orleans after being displaced from the city by Hurricane Katrina for the entire 2005 season, when they went 3-13 under Jim Haslett.
Payton oversaw an immediate storybook turnaround. The Saints won the NFC South, captured the NFC’s second playoff seed, and advanced to the franchise’s first NFC title game by beating Philadelphia in a divisional-round playoff in a rebuilt Superdome — the site of widespread damage and suffering of stranded evacuees right after Katrina had flooded 80% of New Orleans.
Since then, Payton coached the Saints to the playoffs in 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020.
New Orleans narrowly missed the playoffs this past season, going 9-8 in its first campaign since the retirement of Drew Brees. Payton had lured the quarterback to New Orleans as a free agent in 2006.
Payton said he urged the Saints to take a risk on Brees, who was coming off throwing-shoulder surgery, because “we weren’t winning any jump balls” for talent — given the challenges the Saints faced rebuilding the franchise in a community simultaneously rebuilding from one of the worst disasters in American history.
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